The Super Bowl is over, so you’ll have heard about that Dundee: The Son of a Legend Returns Home movie by now. It’s not a sequel coming soon to a theater near you, but a ploy to convince you to book a gorgeous vacation to Australia, perpetrated by the country’s biggest stars, mainly the global ambassador for Tourism Australia two years running, Chris Hemsworth.

He played a small joke on you, but you’ll forgive him. Aussies, they so love to kid. And just look at that face. Can you be mad at that face? I couldn’t. Not because of the Dundee thing, anyway. But I wasn’t in a position to get salty about it; they let me in on the ruse back in early January when I met Hemsworth at the Whitby Hotel in Midtown Manhattan to find out what’s so great about Australia from the country’s walking billboard himself.

I did get mad at his face, actually, but for different reasons. His skin—it’s too good. Pictures don’t do it justice. Tan, but dewy. Virtually poreless. No puffiness, no dark circles. The slightest sign of crows feet that only enhance the overall goodness of it all. The kind of glow that, for most people, takes no fewer than 12 products and a quick blood sacrifice to the god of healthful epidermis. I’m almost certain he steps off a plane looking like he does, too. A handler informed me when he arrived that he was “just touching up a bit” for photos. Less than 10 minutes later, they were ushering him toward me. How is he walking around all the time with a face like that? Has Chris Hemsworth been the god of healthful epidermis this whole time?

On one hand, the state of his face makes sense: he’s a film star. Of course his skin is good. Thank actor genes or top treatments or those special diets that they only tell the stars who are not like us about. On the other hand, this is Chris Hemsworth, man among lesser men. In his latest film, 12 Strong, he divvies up his time between maneuvering a horse through the desert and firing an M4A1. Every story about him starts with the author writing, “We woke at dawn, for today Chris Hemsworth will show me how to tame a [mountain/ocean/dangerous beast].” When he’s not surfing, he’s hiking. When he’s not hiking, he’s racing horses. When he’s not racing horses, he’s off-roading in some kind of large vehicle. All of his family stories seem to involve knives. I’m fairly certain he works out. The guy lives hard.

So does this rough-and-ready, dirt-scootin,’ outback-rambling Aussie moisturize? Does he have a regimen? “I do, actually,” he told me. “I didn’t for a while, and my wife would be like, ‘You’ve got to moisturize.’ And I was like, ‘Ah, whatever.’ And then as she began to look younger, and I began to look older, I think she had a point.”

(After some research, I can verify his claim that the mother of their three children, actress Elsa Pataky, is indeed pulling a Benjamin Button.)

“So, I do try to moisturize now,” he concedes. “Mainly prevention. I spend a lot of time in the sun, you know. And my eyes are very sensitive, so I’ll squint. Then you’re wrinkled up for three hours in the salt water. So, a really good zinc or a sunscreen is essential, and then I use a lot of coconut oil, actually.”

That’s it? That’s it. He subscribes to the minimalist approach to skin care that one might expect from one of those Los Angeles ingenues who has heard tell of this wrinkle thing once or twice, but has no firsthand experience. A bit of sunblock and some coconut oil. “It’s incredibly hydrating,” he said of the oil. “Smells good, too.”

He’s never submitted to a facial, he says, but claims to love massages and, ever the good statesman, he name-checked a favorite local (five-hour flight north of his hometown of Byron Bay) resort called Qualia. (In the only evidence I can find of him there, he’s doing Tai Chi on the edge of pool, which seems like an intense method for resort relaxation.)

So his diet must have something to do with that glow-from-within look. He drinks Earl Grey, or was drinking it when I spoke with him. He cops to making a mean vegetable stew with “every vegetable you can imagine” that he says his three kids who are five and under have “no choice” but to love. “They’re like, ‘Uh, green’s not such a bad color—it’s familiar.’” It appears the small Hemsworth army that he’s raising will glow their way to the top, too.

Maybe the sheen is just a je ne sais Australia. “We don’t tend to be sort of as tightly wound as some people may be,” he said, shrugging. He moved from Los Angeles back to Byron Bay on the East Coast of the continent because in L.A., “Everything reminded me of work and the business and Hollywood and so on.” At home in Byron Bay, a coastal town a couple hours outside Brisbane, he can relax with his family and meet “people in all sorts of different industries and from different lines of work” and “recharge and refocus.”

And recharge he must. Hemsworth is currently coming down from the global press duties for Thor: Ragnarok, putting a pin in the release of 12 Strong, and staring down the barrel of Avengers: Infinity War junkets. On the horizon, there’s a Drew Goddard joint he’s attached his name to, Bad Times at the El Royale, and the looming promise of more Thor,Avengers, and, probably, Star Trek sequels. Did you know Hemsworth lives hard? Best to abscond away home when he can.

He likes Byron Bay for the same reason any normally-sized thirtysomething might: its “organic farming, a lot of community markets, big sort of music scene” and “some of the best coastline in the world. I've traveled and seen a lot of coastlines on the planet, but the blend of tropical bushland with the rugged sort of southern bushland merges together there—pretty special place.” And if all that homegrown R&R doesn’t adequately buff his face, there’s always the coconut oil.

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